Autumn in Art: Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it!

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

(Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841, George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals)

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George – Autumn, 1922

Two Octobers ago I wrote a post called “Different Faces of Autumn” and it was a little selection of autumn themes in art. This year I decided to do something similar. I gathered a few intersting paintings by different painters and all of them have something autumnal in them whether it’s the autumn foliage or pumpkins, autumnal colours, word ‘autumn’ in the painting’s title etc. The first painting here is Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Lake George – Autumn” from 1922. The painting shows the Lake George in Warren County, New York. O’Keeffe’s husband, the famous artist and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, had a family house by the Lake George and that is why Georgia had an opportunity to spend her holidays by the lake. The horizontally elongated shape of the canvas is further emphasised by the composition which consists of four horizontal layers of motives; the thin layer of the sky in the far distance, the mountains, the blue lake and the lush trees with autumnal foliage in the foreground. Every motif is simplified and almost abstracted because O’Keeffe never wanted to portray reality or nature realistically with all its details.

Jean-Francois Millet, Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys, 1872-73

From O’Keeffe’s vibrancy through Millais’ melancholy, in this next painting called The gloomy and foreboding mood of Jean-Francois Millet’s painting “Autumn Landscapes with a Flock of Turkeys” is a stark contrast to O’Keeffe’s playful, nearly abstract, and vibrant portrayal of the Lake George in autumn and Millais’ lyrical and melancholy mood in “Autumn Leaves”. Millet painted this during his stay in the village of Barbizon. He wrote to his patron Frederic Hartmann on the 18 February 1873 that his painting for the dealer Durand-Ruel was almost finished, and he even included a brief description of the painting: “It is a hillock, with a single tree almost bare of leaves, and which I have tried to place rather far back in the picture. The figures are a woman seen from behind and a few turkeys. I have also tried to indicate the village in the background on a lower plane.” The tall tree with bare branches, its last leaves being carried off by the wind of change, turkeys walking aimlessly around the field, a mysterious shrouded figure of a woman, the bleak, earthy brown tones; all of this gives a heavy, autumnal mood to the painting. There is a slight worm’s eye view so the gloomy sky and the tree appear even more threatening and sublime.

Winslow Homer, Pumpkin Patch, 1878

Winslow Homer’s watercolour “Pumpking Patch” is a simple scene from everyday life which shows children in a pumpkin patch. Homer painted many watercolours with scenes from countryside life and these artworks bring to life the day to day activities; women gathering eggs or picking apples, milk maids, shepherdesses, reapers, or just children playing. In this watercolour we see a similar composition to O’Keeffe’s painting; the painting is composed of three horizontal layers; the sky, the haystacks and grass. There is a young boy carrying a pumpking across the pumpkin patch and some children on the left are seen sitting down and chatting. One bird in the sky. Just a peaceful countryside scene from a watercolour master that Homer was.

Camille Pissarro, Autumn, Poplars, Éragny, 1894

Pissarro’s painting “Autumn, Poplars, Eragny” brings to mind the views that I see from the window of the train when I am going to my university lectures. Landscapes of meadows, woods, fields, houses and villages, all pass by my eyes swiftly but they awaken artistic feelings inside me because they bring to mind all the simple yet delightful landscapes painted by Impressionists. The clouds in the baby blue sky are smiling and the sun is casting its warm lightness on the trees and the grass. The green leaves on the branches seem to be competing with the yellow and brown ones. Some trees are completely covered in yellow leaves while some are still green; nothing speaks more of autumnal transience than seeing the leaves on the trees change colour until there are no more leaves left on the branches.

Egon Schiele, Autumn Tree, 1911

Schiele’s approach to painting nature was similar to his approach when it came to painting portraits. For him painting a tree was not just painting a portrait of a tree, painting nature was a way of capturing emotional states. The trees, so thin and so fragile, and almost bare, with their long almost skeletal branches, growing from the wet, barren soil, standing still againsts the gusts of the cold autumn wind, they are symbolic of human isolation and loneliness. Schiele’s portrayal of autumn is this drab, cold November autumn when things are staring to be sad and grey. I wrote more about Schiele’s autumn trees in the post here.

Eliot Hodgkin, Large Dead Leaf No. 2, 1966

Eliot Hodgkin, a less known English artist, painted this interesting painting called “Large Dead Leaf No. 2” in 1966 and I think it fits nicely into this little selection of autumn themed paintings. The date is pretty recent considering the nineteenth century paintings in this post. Hodgkin loved to paint still lives of objects from nature such as fruit, vegetables, flowers, and leaves, and he approached his motives in the similar way that Georgia O’Keeffe did; he noticed the little things that most people wouldn’t and his painting style shows this precise observation and curiosity. Just look at how he approached this dead leaf, which some have suggested is a sycamore leaf but I am not sure. The dead autumn leaf is twisting from dryness and Hodgkins captures all its nuances of brown colour and tiny veins. It’s almost an exercise in mindfulness. Here is what the artist said about his approach in 1957: “In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as Brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this… For myself, if I must put it into words, I try to look at quite simple things as though I were seeing them for the first time and as though no one had ever painted them before.”

I hope you enjoyed this little selection of autumn in art! Naturally, there are many many other autumn themed paintings which are gorgeous and interesting but this is just my selection for this year.

Egon Schiele – Autumn Trees

“When one sees a tree autumnal in summer, it is an intense experience that involves one’s whole heart and being; and I should like to paint that melancholy.”

(Egon Schiele)

Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1918

Austrian painter Egon Schiele, at once demonised and celebrated as a genius, is mostly remembered for his provocative art infused with eroticism and his watercolours and gouache paintings of nude or semi-nude girls appear dangerous even today. Still, many of his paintings of nature and townscapes reveal to us that it wasn’t only the human figure that fascinated him so. Indeed, Schiele found trees and flowers to be equally as good mediums to capture the many emotional states. His persistent dedication to capturing the state of the soul led him to many different motives to paint. In this post we will take a look at three paintings of trees in autumn, all painted by Egon Schiele, but in different times of his life. The first one in this post which you can see above was painted in 1918, near the very end of Schiele’s rather short life – he died on the 31st October 1918 – and the other two were painted in 1911 when Schiele’s artistic career was practically just starting out and he was at the verge of breaking with the style of his teachers and idols and at the point of finding his own way of expression.

Schiele’s oil on canvas painting “Four Trees” painted in autumn of 1918 – the last autumn of his short life – shows a departure from his earlier style of portraying nature and trees. The scene shows four trees in the dusk of an autumn day. This painting is the month of November encapsulated, to me; the trees with red leaves and one almost with branches almost bare, a sense of decay, finality and a sense of inevitable ending, sky descending from warm yellow to deep red tones, and then there is the ominous red setting sun. This is how November feels to me. The setting sun in the sunset of Schiele’s own life. A bloody red sun signifying the death of the day, death of nature as autumn starts to slowly give way to winter’s coldness and desolation. Everything feels so final in November, as if it is happening for the last time because many months of cold, grey weather are before us. The leaves falling down, chestnuts hitting the pavements, evenings coming sooner, wet pavements glistening in the yellow light of the streetlights, dried cornfields seen through the morning fog; just some November imagery that comes to mind.

Egon Schiele, A Tree in Late Autumn, 1911

The two paintings of autumn trees painted in 1911 are very different from the one painted in 1918. A small oil on wood painting “Tree in Late Autumn” painted in 1911 when Schiele was only twenty-one years old is a great example of his ardour for portraying the different states of the soul through the motif he paints. The portrait of this tree is a portrait of isolation; human isolation expressed through the motif of a tree. Some have even called this series of Schiele’s painting “antrophomorphic” and that term may well be applied. The image of a lonesome tree in the middle of nowhere, all alone in the white canvas, painted in dense and heavy brushstrokes, really speaks to the viewer. The twisted, naked branches of the tree are like the arms of a skeleton protruding from the dark, barren soil.

Schiele’s main obsession were portraits and even when he paints trees, flowers or even houses and towns he is always painting portraits, not of people, but of things. Take a look at his sunflowers or his autumn trees here and you will see that without a doubt they are portraits. Schiele was fascinated by death and decay and sought it everywhere he went; in faces of his lovers, the urchins from the streets of Vienna, the roofs and facades of small town of Krumau, the heavy-headed sunflowers, and in the naked and twisted tree autumn trees. Gustav Klimt, Schiele’s early idol, also painted landscapes but they were always decorative and ornamental and their aim was not to capture moods and states of the soul, but rather Klimt painted flowers, trees and gardens as a way to relax on holidays and also to use up the left over paint he had.

These two paintings painted by Schiele in 1911 shows a distinct departure from Klimt’s influence. Schiele isn’t hesitant to leave the background almost bare and he is not eager to use colour and make the painting overflowing with detailings as if it were a Persian rug. Schiele is content with sleek simplicity here and that is the way he was convey the mood of these paintings better. The lack of colours and details allows us to focus solely on the tree and what it stands for, and if you look at it longer you will begin to feel the loneliness and coldness deep in your bones. These are not merry pictures.

Egon Schiele, Autumn Trees, 1911

The painting above, “Autumn Trees”, also from 1911, shows three little trees with leaves still on their branches. Compared to the previous painting this one is a bit more colourful. The brown-green colour of the ground and the pink tinted sky in the background may suggest playfulness, but in the end we still know that these little brown leaves will fall anytime soon and that these thin black branches will be naked and unshielded from cold winter winds. Poor little trees, so weak and frail, and so alone.

Andrea Kowch: A Beautiful Sense of Melancholy and Nostalgia Permeates Everything

“A beautiful sense of melancholy and nostalgia permeates everything as the natural world prepares to surrender itself over to winter.“

(Andrea Kowch)

Andrea Kowch, Knolls Edge

Andrea Kowch is one of my favourite contemporary artists. All of her paintings possess a dreamy and mysterious mood that is bound to make one curious. The everyday plain banality of the countryside is transformed into a scene out of some magic realism novel. Without a doubt, Kowch possesses a rich imagination and she has the artistic skill to match it. I mean, her technique and the detailed approach are impessable. In one interview she said that painting was something meditative for her, she even calls it a “self-therapy”: “The process of being a painter has served as a form of self-therapy for me, in that all the hours I spend painting, I also spend thinking and allowing myself to fully feel my deepest emotions and know myself. I come out of each piece transformed in a new way each time. People need encouragement to get in touch with their realest emotions and embrace them. What some may see in my work as “intense” or “disturbing”, others may see as beautiful and liberating. It happens all the time, and neither interpretation is correct or incorrect.”

A landscape with two women and a tree in the background, so simple in visual motives and yet so mysterious in the mood it conveys. The ordinary becomes extraordinary under Kowch’s brush. Scenes of magic realism indeed, but an interesting thing is that in novels such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” no matter the magic realism the plot and the characters still needs to be explained and it needs to make sense to the reader. On the other hand, Kowch doesn’t need to explain anything in her art; why are these ladies sitting here so near to the jumping frogs, why are they dressed so lightly considering the cold weather indicated by the bare autumnal tree behind them? This is all left to us to interpret and this is the beautiful but also the mysterious side of visual art.

The models for all of Kowch’s paintings are her friends. These two women are sitting casually on the meadow; their bodies are turned to different sides but interestingly they are both looking on the left. What is so interesting over there that we cannot see? The frogs are also casually jumping around but the women don’t seem to mind it the least bit. They appear to be fixated on that something which is beyond our sight. Kowch’s female figures always appear frozen, spellbound even, and this just serves to further the mystery. They are wearing their petticoats, tights and boots but their shoulders are bare. How are they not cold and shivering?

The tree in the background, completely bare and its spooky branches reaching towards the “skies that are ashen and sober” are a good indication of the autumnal weather. And this doesn’t appear to be the golden sunny autumnal day, no, this is the portrait of deep autumn’s doom and gloom. The crows in the background flying around the tree and the fireflies dancing and flying around the women further perpetuate the painting’s mysterious, dreamy charms. I like the line which marks the end of the meadow and behind it we see faint traces of vanilla yellow sunlight coming from afar. It creates a beautiful contrast between the lightness coming from the background and the swampy, frog and fireflies laden meadow bellow.

The tree is a definite ominous element and makes me think of something we would find in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. I also love the way Kowch paints blades of grass; she almost gives individual identity to every single piece of grass or wheat or whatever else she is painting. She truly creates a sense of texture. Perhaps a little bit this meadow and the girls bring to mind Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christine’s World” from 1948, but the atmosphere is different.

Kowch’s painting style may perhaps even be described as “dark fairytale” because both elements are all-pervading in her canvases; the dark, gloomy, almost Gothic vibes with the elements of fairytales and storytelling. In her own words: “I loved fairy-tales as a girl, and still do. They were an escape into a romantic, mysterious, and magical world. The classic tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were the first to charge my imagination as a child. I later discovered and fell in love with the art of Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle… I’ve always been drawn to and intrigued by stories that are a bit twisted; the ones containing strange characters and a prevailing sense of impending danger. Perhaps that’s why my paintings often carry a similar feeling. There’s always an aspect of something unknown about to happen. The story is never fully revealed, it simply continues on, each painting serving as the next page or chapter.”

Some motives that are bound to be seen in nearly all of Kowch’s paintings are the countryside setting, whether it’s the fields of corn, wheat or barley, or the meadows littered with dandelions and other flowers, strange trees with bare and twisted branches, old barns or cottages; women, often with pale wistful faces, messy hair and strange, old-fashioned clothes, then animals such as ravens, seagulls, frogs, turkeys, dogs, roosters, crickets, grasshoppers, rabbits, even a guinea pig in one painting. The colours she uses are distinctly autumnal. She weaves the dreamy tapestries of her imagination in shades of fern and moss green, garnet red, cider, amber and marmalade orange, mustard yellow, ash grey, cinnamon brown, boysenberry purple…

Kowch is not shy when it comes to admitting her love for autumn: “Autumn is my favorite season. The scents in the air, changing landscapes, colors, mood of the sky, air of ominous foreshadowing… It’s when the earth begins to truly bare its soul. It’s when I can feel the bones, core, and essence of nature. There is also a cozy and mysterious quality that inspires me to turn inward and relish solitude and explore deeper feelings. The heavy, rolling clouds spark moods in me which translate into the work. A beautiful sense of melancholy and nostalgia permeates everything as the natural world prepares to surrender itself over to winter. All of those things are very poignant, and speak to my soul in many profound ways.”

All the quotes in this post are from an interview which you can read here.

Yoshio Markino – Autumn

“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!”

(Humbert Wolfe)

Yoshio Markino, Autumn, 1904

I have often presented works of Western artists here on the blog, mostly Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, who were inspired, in one way or another, by the Japanese art of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Some of these artists that I have written about were Maurice Prendergast, Vincent van Gogh, Whistler, Henri Riviere, Raphael Kirchner, just to name a few. A lot of European artists have been very enthusiastic about Japanese art ever since Japan opened its borders to the world in the mid nineteenth century but in the case of the Japanese artist Yoshio Markino it is the other way around. Markino was a Japanese artist who from an early age had a fascination with the Western art and he not only took stylistic inspiration from it but actually moved to the Western world; first to USA in 1893 at the age of twenty-four and then to London in 1897. For a short while in 1908 and 1909 he even resided in Italy because of something art-related. Markino loved his life in England and he returned to Japan in 1942 after England had declared war on Japan. Markino lived a very long life and he was a very prolific artist, mostly known for his magnificent depictions of London streetscenes and foggy weather and this is known as Markino’s “fog and mist watercolours”. His art is of a peculiar kind because it is a true mix between the east and the west.

At the moment, and appropriate for these golden and misty October days, my favourite of Markino’s paintings is the one above called “Autumn”, painted in 1904. It shows a woman in the street on a windy autumn day. She cannot seem to open her umbrella and the frustration can be seen in her face expression. Autumnal colours – orange and browns – dominate the painting and the delicate sense of transience is indicated in the fall of the leaves carried away gently by the autumn wind, never to return to their branches, dancing their last dance. There is a dynamic play between foreground and background; at first glance we see the auburn haired woman in the foreground with her umbrella and a tree full of orange leaves above her, and then, painted in a more poetic and dreamy way, is the background with the carriage slowly departing. Our view is clouded from so many leaves flying in the air.

A faint church tower can be seen and also some treetops but these background elements are painted in such a delicate, hushed, and subtle way, almost ghostly or as something seen in the memory. The harsh lines of reality are subdued in Markino’s poetic brushstrokes. Not only the leaves in the air but also the woman’s clothes indicate the presence of the wind and the direction of it. While the background is imbued with a sense of dreamy stillness, the foreground is a place of where dynamic playfulness. A very interesting thing is also the face expression of the woman. It is so particular, even the way her facial features are painted. The cheeks, rosy like a rosebud, the eyebrows, the narrow eyes, all of it brings to mind the faces of the figures in the ukiyo-e art which is known for its expressivness.

9 Years on the Blog: There are places I don’t remember, There are times and days, they mean nothing to me

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking on the days that are no more.”

(Lord Tennyson – Tears, Idle Tears)

John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1856

Today my blog is nine years old! At first I didn’t really know what to say on this ocassion, I thought: nine years and that is that, whatever, nothing to say. I am a person who doesn’t usually enjoy birthdays or anniversaries because they remind me of the passing of time, but that is precisely why this nine year blog anniversary does matter and why I decided to celebrate it anyway. It matters because it is not only the nine years of this blog and almost a thousands posts published, it is also nine years of my life. Every year, every season on the blog, every painting, every post is a fragment of my life, and my soul. Every anniversary of this blog reminds me of the passing of time. Thinking about nine years that have passed sets me off into a reverie…

Thinking of transience, I cannot help but hear in my mind the wistful violins from Tindersticks’ 1995 song “Travelling Light”. The song’s lyrics hold a special meaning for me and the older I get the more I can relate to them; people come into your life and leave it without a noise, without a sound and days go on like nothing has changed. People die, and leave, and disappear, and yet you get up the next morning and drink coffee and life goes one. Hearts get broken and brokenly live on, to quote the Romantic Lord Byron whose “muse” I am. Well, I am not really but I named my blog so. Things that seemed so important back then now mean nothing to me, and faces from old photographs are like ghosts from another life. I am usually a person who clings to every littlest thing that has memory for me; a piece of paper, train ticket, pressed flower, for I am hopelessly clinging to the past, in vain trying to stop the unstoppable; the passing of time. But lately I had started to feel like Miss Havisham, suffocating in my little room full of spiderwebs, pretty objects and memories and so I am learning to shed myself from the burden of all those memories, like a snake sheds off its skin, so that I may walk lighter into the future. Here are the lyrics:

There are places I don’t remember
There are times and days, they mean nothing to me
I’ve been looking through some of them old pictures
They don’t serve to jog my memory

I’m not waking in the morning, staring at the walls these days
I’m not getting out the boxes, spread out all over the floor
I’ve been looking through some of them old pictures
Those faces they mean nothing to me no more

I travel light
You travel light
Everything I’ve done
You say you can justify, mmm you travel light

I can’t pick them out, I can’t put them in these sad old bags
Some things you have to lose along the way
Times are hard, I’ll only pick them out, wish I was going back
Times are good, you’ll be glad you ran away….

*

There are many reasons why I chose John Everett Millais’ painting “Autumn Leaves” for this post; firstly, because it is one of my favourite paintings; secondly, because it is poetic and beautiful and represent the mood I have been trying to cultivate on my blog for years; and thirdly, because its autumnal setting is a perfect setting for my thoughts about transience and the passing of time. The painting – a true Pre-Raphaelite gem – shows four girls in the dusk of the day gathering leaves in a pile. What a simple scene visually yet imbued with so much wistfulness, melancholy and lyrical beauty. The dried orange and brown leaves set the time of the year; autumn, a time for farewells and endings. The sky in the background, painted in purples and yellow, so romantic, a perfect twilight, as Millais had put it. The two long-haired girls in black dresses were the younger sisters of Millais’ wife; Alice and Sophy Gray. Their round faces are full of girlish innocence, but still melancholy is casting a shadow over them, and their large blue eyes are filled with yearning. Millais had painted Sophie on many ocassions and her face, with the blue eyes laden with sadness and cherry red lips is perfect for the Pre-Raphaelite art. Rosy cheeks and wistful gazes, these girls are caught at the border between girlhood and womanhood; fragile, sad days. One more autumn passing by, one more year passing by… how many are left?

I will take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been following my blog in the past nine years and everyone who shared their words of encouragment and kindness with me.

Tomislav Krizman – Autumn

“Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.”

(Emily Bronte)

Tomislav Krizman, Autumn, 1904, litograph

Tomislav Krizman’s gorgeous litograph “Autumn” truly encapsulates the dual nature of autumn; its richness, ecstasy and vibrancy, and its melancholy and wistfulness. The colours, the mood, the composition; everything about this litograph is absolutely perfect to me. In a true Art Nouveau manner, the spirit of autumn is presented in the form of a woman. She is seen from the profile, clutching a cluster of autumn leaves to her chest. Her eyes are closed and her pale face oozes wistfulness and silent resignation. The white dress she is wearing contrasts beautifully with the harmony of orange and yellow in the woods in the background. The woman’s flaxen hair and the leaves are flying in the autumn breeze. The hair is captured in its dance, the leaves in their fall. Both the leaves on the trees and the leaves that the lady is holding in her arms are impervious to the gusts of wind. She is clutching them on her bosom, but she is unable to hold onto them all. Autumn is, after all, a season of nature that brings to our attention the bittersweet transient nature of everything on earth. The leaves will change colour, the trees tops, once lush and full of life and birdsong, will become bare. In the background we see a forest; thin dark tree trunks and the ground covered in the leafy carpet of orange and gold. The ground stretches all the way in the distance and this gives an illusion of depth. This manner of portraying trees and the woods is something we see often in paintings of a fellow Secessionist painter from the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Gustav Klimt. In those paintings, his fir and pine woods acquire a certain solemn silence and a strange mysticism, one almost feels as if one is entering into another world. Composition-wise, this is a stunning and beautiful contrast of the figure in the foreground and the vibrant woods in the background. The mood of autumn is beautifully captured, but another thing I love about this litograph is how poetic it is, like a poem full of onomatopoeia; I can just hear the rustle of leaves, the whisper of the wind through the trees, rain drops hitting the ground in a wonderful rhythm of nature.

Different Faces of Autumn; Groovy Landscapes and Wistful Faces

I love autumn for its richness, warm colours, falling leaves and its mystery, at the same time I loathe it because it’s the doorway to months of quiet, grey dreariness and winter’s misery. Whether you love autumn or hate it, I feel that no other season of the year has the power to touch us in such a peculiar and poignant way. Anguish of transience weighs on my soul as I gaze at the leaves falling down and the trees becoming more bare as each day passes. There’s something final about it, a sense of ending… No other season has such bittersweet duality; golden afternoons and dark overcast days, leaves rustling under foot and morbid silence of a hard, dry soil; the last ecstasy of colours and sights, and the most dreary sense of an end.

George Bellows, Romance of Autumn, 1916

George Bellows is mostly remembered in relation to the Ashcan group of artists and he was known for portraying the grim reality of the big city, but his painting “Romance of Autumn” is intensely vibrant and groovy and brings out this whimsical, warm side of autumn. The painting shows a woman in white and a man in blue climbing over the rocks and in front of their eyes a magical landscape painted int the most exquisite, intense, uplifting, electrifying magical colours; purples, electric blue, pink, orange and blue. Each colours shines and smiles as in a dream. The gesture of the girl holding the man’s hand seems symbolic; she is helping him climb up the rocks and see for himself the fantastical landscape that she is seeing, she is inviting him to step into the autumnal fantasy with her. This is the dream, this is the autumn seen through rose-tinted glasses.

O. Louis Guglielmi, Connecticut Autumn, 1937

Guglielmi was born in Cairo, spent his early childhood in Milano and Geneva, and in 1914 destiny took his over the ocean. His painting “Connecticut Autumn”, painted in the depressing decade of 1930s, shows a very different face of autumn; the face of desolation, decay and poverty. Despite of their warm orange and yellow colours, the buildings beside the road look desolate and abandoned. The whole scene reeks of alienation, as if no human foot had stepped there for a long time. Unused blocks of marble lie around idly, useless and forgotten just like the town itself. No one needs monuments any more, nothing to celebrate and glorify. The figure of the angel is the only figure out of all the marble blocks. The thin trees in the distant edges of the painting look dead and unreal, and the young boy is the only living thing in this desolate landscape. His childhood innocence and naivety are a shield from reality. Decay and depression of his surroundings cannot touch him. He is flying his kite under the mournful gaze of the forgotten marble angel. But again the hope and optimism are crushed, for his kite gets tangled in the power lines. The sky is darkening and the angel is motionless and silent.

Marco Calderini (Italian, 1850-1941), Gardens of the Palazzo Reale, Turin, c. 1890-1910

This painting by an Italian painter Marco Calderini quite realistically portrays the loneliness of parks in autumn; when rains descend, the trees are bare, the skies are grey, and you can’t even sit on a bench because it’s wet so you linger around the desolate park, like a ghost, circling the statues and avoiding the puddles, and you cannot help but fantasise of the days, not so long ago, when the grass was green, the flowers bloomed and golden sunlight was coming through the lush tree tops. You cannot help but think of mortality and transience when you see that the trees are wet, dark and bare and the air is cold as the grave. Born, lived and died in Turin, Calderini’s oeuvre is filled with romanticised landscapes with poetic moods. Painting “Gardens of the Palazzo Real” is at once realistic and poetic. This is exactly how parks and gardens look like after autumn rains, and yet no one can deny the romantic wistfulness and loneliness that the scene shows.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Autumn Regrets, 1882

John Atkinson Grimshaw was a master of portraying cold, lonely autumn streets where golden light of the street lamps falls on the damp pavements, wetness and mists. The painting “Autumn Regrets” perfectly portrays the wistfulness of autumn and that “what’s done is done” feeling. The woman is sitting on a bench, she is dressed in black and both her clothes and her pose speak of her deep thoughts and regrets. All around her the soil is being transformed into a golden-orange carpet of chestnut leaves. The wind seems to be whispering “This is the end, beautiful friend…” Regrets flood our hearts and minds so easily in autumn; we could have done more, and we could have done things better, or at least differently. But what is done is done, now the flowers bloom no more and every new leaf which falls from the tree is like a confirmation of the ending. Autumn has a way of getting under our skin, whether we like it or not. Autumn is a feeling, a state to be in, not just one of four seasons. And to end:

“This is the autumn: it — just breaks your heart!
Fly away! fly away! —
The sun crawls along the mountain
And rises and rises
And rests with every step.
How the world became so withered!
Upon worn, strained threads
The wind plays its song.
Hope fled…”

(Nietzsche, In the German November, 1884)

Edouard Cortes – Romantic Visions of Autumn in Paris; Falling Leaves, Tramways and Street Lamps

Edouard Cortes’ scenes of Parisian streets in Autumn – with rainy avenues, golden leaves falling on grey pavements, hustle, carriages, jade-coloured light of street lamps, tramways – form a perfect background for daydreaming in these cold, misty and gloomy days when winds roar and leaves that flutter in lonely parks bring thoughts of transience and melancholy to one’s mind.

Edouard Cortes, Boulevard de la Madeleine, date unknown, probably 1900s

French Post-Impressionistic artist Edouard Cortes captured the mood of Autumn in the city, Paris to be precise, like no other artist. Autumn scenes of the countryside are luscious, rich in colours and fruit of nature, exuberant and beautiful, but Autumn in La Belle Epoque Paris is incomparable by beauty; with carriages, street lamps, leaves fluttering in alleys, parks resting in solitude, tramways, pavements shining in the rain, hustle, trees with almost bare branches, kiosks on street corners, booksellers by Seine and people roasting chestnuts on the open fire, street musicians; everything warm, golden and flickering in Autumnal dusk. And still, there’s something fleeting in that beauty, something that the eye of the beholder can’t grasp. Cortes’ distinctly romantic, dreamy and lyrical portrayals of Autumn in Paris reminds me of these beautiful verses of Rilke’s poem Autumn Day:

‘…Because whoever has no house now will build no more.
Whoever is alone now will remain long alone
to wake, read, write long letters,
and wander in the alleys, back and forth,
restless, as the leaves flutter.’  (Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke)

Original sounds even better:

‘Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.‘ (source)

Cortes (1882-1969) lived in the heart of Paris, and in his art he strived to capture the fleeting moments, the change of atmosphere, and in that aspect he is similar to the British artist John A. Grimshaw who captured the changing looks of the late Victorian industrial cities of the North. But Cortes was a Post-Impressionist, which means he continued the task of the Impressionists, an impossible task sometimes – to capture the fleeting moment, and he loved portraying his beloved city of Paris in different weather or season; morning mists, sunlight as it hits the shining facades, dusks, summer nights, solitary winter afternoons, pavements shining with rain, windy days… He often chose one particular spot, and we all know that the architecture of Paris is a beautiful background by itself, such as Boulevard de la Madeleine, Avenue de l’Opera, Eiffel Tower or Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle Porte St Denis. He captured the changing seasons in Paris, portraying each with its unique beauty, but my favourites were his autumn scenes and I couldn’t resist not sharing this beauty.

Not only did Cortes chose beautiful and picturesque motifs for his paintings, but he also painted in a way which intensified the beauty of the scenes; capturing each golden gleam of a street lamp, each drop or rain on the pavement and each leaf in one brilliant brushstroke. This is especially noticeable in the painting ‘Flower Market at la Madeleine’ where faces of passer byes and flowers in the stalls are painted in rich, exuberant, heavy and thick brushstrokes, but when you observe the painting as a whole, the effect is a sight of flickering beauty, jewel colours melting into the greyness of the street. It’s interesting to me that if you compare his paintings from early 1900s to the ones from the roaring twenties, you see a difference, but they are equal in beauty. Shorter hemlines on dresses of the ladies, or the sight of cars – not a detail had compromised the romantic appeal of his Autumnal scenes of Parisian life.

Edouard Cortes, Flower Market at la Madeleine, exact date unknown, probably 1900s or early 1910s

Edouard Cortes, Flower Market at la Madeleine, date unknown

Edouard Cortes, Boulevard a Paris, date unknown, 1900s probably

Edouard Cortes, Boulevard de la Madeleine, 1920s

  Edouard Cortes, Quay du Louvre, 1925

Edouard Cortes, Booksellers Along the Seine, 1920s

Edouard Cortes, Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle Porte St Denis, probably 1920s

Edouard Cortes, Boulevard de la Madeleine, probably 1920s